Sabrina Tarasoff (FI, 1991)
Residency period: October 2024-February 2025
My research at La Becque focused on developing a series of seminars at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, revolving the concept of “attraction” both as a technological and mediated response to Romantic and post-Romantic literature, and as a visual device or structure, broadly employed across theater, animation, film, theme parks, and visual art.
While the teaching component allowed my research to progress in the playful and open context of both the seminars and a final workshop week with the students at La Becque, the residency as a whole also permitted me the (priceless and rare) time and space to develop these thoughts in writing. Here, my attention was directed to questions on how post-structuralist accounts of attraction, particularly that of Maurice Blanchot, and the theme park attraction might speak to each other, through mutual concerns on play, chance, risk, and disorientation.
The resulting essay, titled Sic Vita Fugit–an homage to the sundial fitted onto the facade of the town hall in La Tour-de-Peilz–is a playful rereading of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, which mobilizes the concept of “attraction” to examine the transformative influence of literary play within certain tropic sites–most notably, the heavily Romanticized Alpine landscape, all from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc to Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds. — Sabrina Tarasoff
A resident as part the ECAL residency program, Sabrina Tarasoff (b. 1991) is a writer and critic based in Paris. Her work has been extensively published across publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, and C Magazine. Tarasoff’s writings, revolving critical theory, literature, and visual cultures, have also recently appeared in catalogues and books by Inventory Press, American Art Catalogues, and Semiotext(e). Her on-going research into Los Angeles’ cultural milieu in the 1980s was featured in the Hammer Museum’s 2020 biennial, a version, and is currently being developed into a book of essays, titled Fantasyworld. She is also the editor of the first anthology of late poet Bob Flanagan’s collected writings, Fun To Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan, published by Kristina Kite Gallery and Pep Talk.
Sabrina Tarasoff, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier